My thoughts/comments are indicated by an asterisk (*).

Worldware refers to materials created for purposes other than teaching and learning.

Wesch – 100% want to learn, 50% want to be in classroom

We are all immigrants  because we have yet to learn to think critically.

Students are swirling, using multiple institutions to facilitate learning.

Students who value critical thinking are significantly more likely to value: peer critiques, community, and self-assessment.

Testing to kill learning?

Cites AACU report American Association of Colleges and Universities survey of US 301 Business Leader. (pull quotes)

Nace 2008 webcitation.org/5XoKP5UJh

Erosion of public’s faith and good will toward higher ed.

bush satire comic tell me johnny what have you learned, mcgraw-hill

Bloom warned of the danger of confusing taxonomy with chronology.

Harvard Private Universe Project honors the power and sophoitication of (students) ideas.

The Disengagement Compact – “I won’t expect too much of you if you don’t ask too much of me.”

WSU Critical Thinking Project (http://wsuctproject.wsu.edu)

Great focus slide comparing teacher, learner and learning centricity

• Teacher centric: Assign Task, Study & Perform, Test & Submit
• Learner centric: Cooperate, Study, Interact & Perform, Test & Submit
• Learning centric: Help Define, Study, Collaborate, Discover, Generate; Share Beyond Class

Held an e-Portfolio Contest to identify innovative uses/styles of folio

The ideal ePortfolio continuum model: Select -> Reflect (initial) -> Feedback -> Loop back -> Longitudinal reflection

* How can we leverage this in working with employers?

Process over product (the process can be replicated, the product may or may not)

* I am going to get the slides and provide more reflection later. Gary shared some incredible quotes about the value of the ePortfolio

The Harvesting Gradebook
(WSU is using SharePoint) Activity Planning, Targeted Messaging, Learner Agency, Importing & Exporting Grades, Performance Over Time, Grade Calculations

Need to look into WSU model as this is perfect for our needs!
Student submits works for review using common, public rubric.
Faculty assignments can be reviewed using a similar rubric.

Presentation may be available here.

Tags: camptech08campus-technology campus technology education web2.0 next-gen worldware academic

From Desire2Learn:

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims. We caution that this is a NON-final action; both Blackboard and Desire2Learn will have an opportunity to comment before a final action will issue, and after that, the decision will be subject to appeals.However, we’re still pleased.

View Entry

From Blackboard:

Dear Blackboard Community,

Today, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a first Office Action in the reexamination proceeding regarding Blackboard’s U.S. Patent 6,988,138 (“the ’138 Patent”). This Office Action was expected and is the first step in a reexamination process that often takes years to complete. It has no effect on the validity of the patent, the lawsuit between Blackboard and Desire2Learn or the pending injunction against Desire2Learn.

We remain very confident in the strength of our patent and have provided more information about today’s announcement should you have questions. Please see www.blackboard.com/patent for more information.

View Entry

All of this follows on the heels of Blackboard’s victory in their lawsuit against Desire2Learn a few weeks ago.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: blackboard, patent, lawsuit, desire2learn

“The most shocking part of going back to school at this point in my life (in her 30s) is looking around and realizing that nobody is in the room. The professor is just another open browser window, 1 of 10.”

Profs compete for students’ attention | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

Part of my role as Coordinator for Learning Technologies at Plymouth State University is to work with our faculty in adapting to the new technologies that permeate our campus. While this quote from a recent CNet News article is nothing new, it is a reminder that just as technology is changing the way we communicate, it is also affecting the way that we teach. As evidenced by the quote above from Sharyl Grant, a non-trad student at UNC, technology is changing the way we interact even in the physical realm. When the “professor is just another open browser window,” is that a function of technology or rather a dysfunction of our teaching practice? K-12 teachers have grown up In an age of multiple intelligences and learning styles, differentiated instruction and Bloom’s Taxonomy. Yet in higher ed where we often still practice the lecture to learn, drill and kill, one-sided conversation/passive consumption methodology of information dissemination, can we really blame technology for a lack of student engagement or is it just another outlet (like doodling and note passing) for those stifled minds who reject passive learning and are seeking an opportunity for engagement?

Image courtesy of DavidDMuir

There are typically three schools of thought that seem to be prevalent. The first is the desire for an outright ban on laptop and mobile use in the classroom. Those faculty in this camp feel that their students should be focused entirely on what is being lectured and that technology serves only as a distraction to their learning. The second perspective is to simply ignore the technology use and pretend that it isn’t there, to teach around it. The last perspective is to embrace technology use and leverage it to make the class more engaging – integrating technology into their learning experience.

Now, integrating technology into the classroom experience at the higher ed level can be challenging and often means more preparatory work, and yet it has the potential to be far more engaging than the relatively static experience of lectures, overheads and PowerPoint presentations. Consider the opportunities for learning we could create if we tap our students’ affinity for technology by challenging them in class to find and share appropriate and timely references, news briefs, videos or lectures on our subject matter. Imagine if we showed our students how technology can serve them, rather than the other way around.

The 21-st century treats knowledge and information as currency and those who can effectively acquire, process and synthesize that knowledge into actionable projects and tangible results will be far better prepared for the world they will enter.

The image above is a screenshot of the resources I was utilizing to create this blog post. I tossed out a call for image resources to my Twitter network. I was searching for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr. I was composing my post in my Flock (web browser) editor with my Google Reader RSS feeds in the background. My feeds are what turned me on to this article and got me thinking about writing this post. Imagine the power of harnessing these resources to improve our classroom experience. What would a higher ed classroom look like if our students were actually engaged in the learning process, rather than sitting in their lecture seats as passive vessels? As web browsing becomes resource hunting, as personal Instant Messaging gave way to consulting one’s personal learning network, as students become partners instead of problems.

If the professor is simply browser window 1 of 10, the question then becomes this:

“Is the professor allowing this to occur because they have not created and drawn their students into an actively engaged learning community?”

Neither ignoring nor banning technology use will engage your students as effectively as embracing it and harnessing it for productive means. And embracing technology does not require that professors be tech experts, the students have that down. Professors just need to do what they’ve always done: share, guide, challenge and refine. They’re just doing it with more support and far greater resources than they’ve had in the past.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: attention, college, university, teaching, learning

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Educause has a series that highlights specific current technologies and boils them down into a mini-sheet that tech coordinators and advocates can use on their own campus. Unlike some of the Educause resources which require membership, this series is open to the general public which means that K-12 folks can access them as well. New brief sheets have followed a monthly publishing schedule with the latest being the Twitter brief posted just this month.

The series can be found here, but the individual links of papers (in PDF format) posted as of 19 July 2007 are listed below. I find looking at the timeline of releases interesting from an anthropological perspective as it illustrates where the edtech interest was focused over the past two years that these briefs have been published.

7 Things You Should Know About:

• Skype (December 2007)
• Citizen Journalism (November 2007)
• Data Visualization (October 2007)
• Haptics (September 2007)
• Cyber-Infrastructure (August 2007)
• Twitter (July 2007)
  
• Wikipedia (June 2007)
• Facebook II (May 2007)
• RSS (April 2007)
• Creative Commons (March 2007)
• Open Journaling (February 2007)
• Digital Storytelling (January 2007)
• E-Books (November 2006)
• Google Earth (October 2006)
• YouTube (September 2006)
• Facebook I (August 2006)
• Mapping Mashups (July 2006)
• Virtual Worlds (June 2006)
• Google Jockeying (May 2006)
• Remote Instrumentation (April 2006)
• Screencasting (March 2006)
• Virtual Meetings (February 2006)
• Grid Computing (January 2006)
• Collaborative Editing (December 2005)
• Instant Messaging (November 2005)
• Augmented Reality (September 2005)
• Blogs (August 2005)
• Video Blogging (August 2005)
• Wikis (July 2005)
• Podcasting (June 2005)
• Clickers (May 2005)
• Social Bookmarking (May 2005)

[tags]educause, 7things, technology, edtech, briefsheet, whitepaper[/tags]

Powered by ScribeFire.

SafeAssign checks submitted papers (Word, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML and ZIP packages of these) against the Internet using Windows Live Search technology. Blackboard has partnered with ProQuest ABI/Inform and searches against their 2.5 million articles database. SafeAssign also checks against a local institutional database of locally submitted work, as well as a Global Reference Database which is comprised of submissions volunteered by students from SafeAssign campuses. Obviously this database is expected to grow over time as the SafeAssign system is adopted by Blackboard institutions. It is important to note that the Global Reference Database is an opt-in service that students may elect to take advantage of in order to protect their own work.

Beyond the course integration aspect, SafeAssign also boasts a Direct Submit feature that allows faculty (not students as of the current release) to check documents on a “one-off” basis if they receive work that triggers their “spidey-sense.”

Gradebook integration is not yet available for CE/Vista campuses meaning that after the creation of the assignment, the faculty member will also need to create a new grading column in order to provide a grade value. It is expected that a patch will be issued that will provide this service in the coming months.

General Counsel Matthew Small noted that this new service will in no way affect the PowerLink or Building Block servicing TurnItIn, and the general flavor is that TurnItIn is still considered a strong corporate partner. Greg Ritter pointed out that those institutions currently employing TurnItIn may be loath to move away and abandon the student submissions collected through their use of the TurnItIn service.

[tags]blackboard, bbworld07, safeassign, turnitin, plagiarism[/tags]

Blogged with Flock

CIO Michael Chasen announced that starting today all of the Blackboard Learning Systems: Blackboard, CE and Vista are able to download and install via either Building Blocks or PowerLinks, a new anti-plagiarism tool, SafeAssign. The tool can act either stand-alone locally or, like TurnItIn, it can upload student work to a centralized database that will then “protect” a student’s intellectual property from inappropriate use by other user’s of SafeAssign. There were a couple of interesting features such as a direction citation tool that identifies the specific resource that appears to have been used and the ability to allow students to “opt in” to the service (which I believe can be turned off administratively thereby effectively mandating use of the service). I wonder what kind of financial impact this will have on TurnItIn when Blackboard institutions learn that they can save the tens of thousands of dollars they spend on their annual subscription costs?

In other news, Chasen also announced the availability of a new tool intended to bridge the three learning environments. Available with the licensing of one of their three systems: Community, Content or Outcomes, is their Learning Environment Connector. Although a QA tech I was speaking with thought it was already available, I haven’t been able to find it on their site to link to as of yet. The idea is that schools will be able to bridge users to other Bb LMSes, as well as to the three Systems. This is big news as it is the first sign that the company is working to bring the formerly disparate environments together. In our own university system in New Hampshire, it means that Plymouth State which employs the Campus Edition version of the LMS may well be able to leverage the community and content systems that both UNH and Granite State College were only able to access as they were Blackboard sites. Rather than worry about the differences in our LMS, we can now focus on developing points of collaboration and tangency for our respective and some times cross-pollinating student bodies.

[tags]blackboard, bbworld07, chasen, turnitin, safeassign[/tags]

Powered by ScribeFire.

• Incentives matter – For both good and bad. Leavitt opines that anything worth winning is worth cheating for. My take, if you make the prize too valuable, people will often cheat to obtain it (he sites the example of tax returns prior to the requirement to include your dependents SSNs and the overnight “disappearance” of over 7 million children that tax year). But also, folks like to feel like they are valued and therefore it is important to ensure that the incentive is relative to the task.
• One small idea can tip the balance – In the example above, a single IRS employee made the suggestion twice over a period of years. His suggestion, once acted upon, has meant an over 30 billion dollar increase in revenue. You never know when your one simple suggestion could have such an enormous impact, so act!
• Education is ripe for a revolution – We’re still trying to teach the same way we did 40 years ago. The corporate world has evolved, why hasn’t education? By the way, Leavitt also mentioned that the idea of tenure in the world of higher education has to go because it no longer serves it’s original purpose and now simply ensures that mediocrity is rewarded. I’m sure that will stir the pot with educators but perhaps he has a point.

I just finished listening to Tapscott’s Wikinomics, perhaps I should now add Leavitt’s Freakonomics to my list.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I look forward to hearing from you!

[tags]communication, highered, skype[/tags]

Blogged with Flock

At first glance, it seems reasonably priced at $50/year, but upon further review the pricing structure is $50 per user per year. So rather than attract an audience in the small business, non-profit organization and small school higher ed markets, the pricing structure may only be appealing to larger organizations such as Disney’s Pixar. You can compare the feature sets between their Standard and Premier editions although the difference seems to primarily revolve around email storage capacity, service continuity and support, and the ability to integrate APIs and third-party apps. Incredibly, Docs and Spreadsheets is included in the Standard feature set so if you don’t require advanced integration points and don’t mind ads, don’t bother with the Premier at least until they roll out more features.

I’m still waiting/hoping/expecting integration with their Google Groups feature in order to support a small team approach to project management.

[tags][/tags]

powered by performancing firefox

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

The author recognizes that there is blame to share, beginning with the trustees and continuing through the administrative ranks. But who does the author feels is at the root of the problem?

I blame most of all the professoriate.  This is who has let me and the world’s entire educational enterprise down.  They are supposed to be intelligent and wise and to know better.  In the classroom, they act like they know it all, so why aren’t they actualizing that comprehensive vision outside the classroom?

The post is lengthy and can be found in its entirety here. But I’ve culled out some of the nuggets that held meaning for me:

The information revolution will not eliminate the teacher, merely liberate him to become a better teacher.  The only cost to the teacher will be preparation.  She must become fit to teach, able to use the wonderful new tools that are transforming our discipline.

People need high touch as much as they do high tech.  They always will.  While computers will continue to get better and better at freeing the classroom teacher from the routine elements of instruction, they will never be able to inspire.

Teachers must abandon their role as the definitive source of information and become facilitators instead.  Their new role is not to instruct but to guide discovery.

The whole purpose of the teacher is not to posture as an authority but
to share knowledge and understanding, to empower students.

All organizations, all humans , are resistant to change.  Our teachers teach the way they are taught, because that is what they know.  We cling to what is safe and familiar.

As much as I found the piece engaging, in as much as it echoes some of my own personal beliefs about the state of the educational machine. However, given my current advocacy for digital literacy and critical analysis in the age of Google, I wanted to apply a bit of triangulation to assess bias and authority. As I did, a couple of things stood out and concern me about how this piece would be received by others.

1. The author is anonymous. Although the author espouses a desire for educational reform, civil discourse, etc. the choice of anonymity seems to me contradictory. While I would like to believe that this was written by a peer to the professoriate that he rails against, the lack of background diminishes the argument. The About page presents an almost farce-like face to the blog.
2. In reading the authors earlier posts, while they are certainly thought provoking, the tone and language suggests a biased perspective as opposed to a global one. 

But even without the external validation, and although as I stated earlier I didn’t necessarily agree with everything the author wrote, much of the perspective centering around the evolving nature of information, knowledge and learning has a ring of currency and truth.

[tags]education, highered, college, university, professor [/tags]

powered by performancing firefox

From Inside Higher Ed, comes this post:

“…the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work.”

I am not trying to vilify the faculty at Middlebury, as a matter of fact I agree that making any decision or basing an assumption of fact on a single source is a dangerous idea at best. However I would opine that we should instead operate from the assumption that all of our sources should be considered suspect. Regardless of the source, in this digital age of information we should all be instilling within our learners a clear and focused approach to vetting that information. Rather than banning or explicitly ignoring social sources, we should instead be teaching our students how to verify their data. Even peer reviewed journals, the historical bastion of credulity, are not without their own margin of error(1).

I liken this process to the following analogy:

Growing up, I was a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol. One of our primary missions was search and rescue, often relying upon ELTs (Emergency Location Transmitters, now known as EPIRBs), to locate downed aircraft. If we were to rely upon a single line of bearing, the margin of error is such that we would be unlikely to find the plane. Utilizing two lines of bearing from two different angles results in a lower margin of error, but one with a significant search grid. But using triangulation, three lines of bearing, results in a degree of accuracy which minimizes the search grid and maximizes the chance of finding the aircraft.

If we were to use this approach with our information, we would require at least three sources from differing angles (read bias, approach, study type, etc.) to corroborate the meaning we derive from our data.

Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, and by their own admission should never be used as a primary source.

Wikipedia officials agree — in part — with Middlebury’s history department. “That’s a sensible policy,” Sandra Ordonez, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail interview. “Wikipedia is the ideal place to start your research and get a global picture of a topic, however, it is not an authoritative source. In fact, we recommend that students check the facts they find in Wikipedia against other sources. Additionally, it is generally good research practice to cite an original source when writing a paper, or completing an exam. It’s usually not advisable, particularly at the university level, to cite an encyclopedia.”

However, the approach being taken is not addressing the cause, simply attacking the symptoms.

(1) This is not a solid conclusion but there is enough documentation to bear further review.
Sources:

• http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/263/10/1353
• http://jama.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/21/2786
• http://www.ama-assn.org/public/peer/7_13_94/pv3089x.htm
• http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/08-01/arms.html

[tags][/tags]

powered by performancing firefox

The competition was the first step in a process, called the 21st Century Project, that the association hopes will lead to construction of a prototype residence hall.

It appears that modularity was a common theme amongst the 46 entrants. The winning proposal was submitted by Jonathan Levi, architect and Harvard University adjunct professor. His proposal envisioned:

Residence-hall rooms of the future will be made in a factory, trucked to campuses, and stacked with other matching units — each constructed of sustainably harvested wood — to form buildings complete with lounges and corridors. The rooms will be filled with modular furnishings that can easily be switched out as needs change. A kitchenette might be rolled in to replace a second bed, for instance. And the rooms will be redecorated as often as their occupants see fit to reprogram the interactive floor-to-ceiling media walls.

[tags]dorm, residence, college, university, living, acuho, design [/tags]

powered by performancing firefox

The Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC’s
request raises “a substantial new question of patentability” regarding
all 44 claims of Blackboard’s patent….

A re-examination of this type usually takes one or two years to
complete. Roughly 70% of re-examinations are successful in having a
patent narrowed or completely revoked.

This is very interesting news for those who have been following this issue since Blackboard’s announcement of their patent last summer and their subsequent lawsuit against their next strongest competitor (in terms of market share) Desire2Learn. While this may take up to two years, a patent rejection might well be the impetus that is needed to bring Blackboard back to reality. The corporate monolith mentality and disdain for their user community has not served them well in the past year.

[tags]blackboard, patent, software, freedom, lawsuit, desire2learn, lms, cms [/tags]

powered by performancing firefox

I am down in Southbridge, MA, a 3-hour drive from the mountains of NH, for a NERCOMP event which is bringing together current and hopeful Moodle users from the northeast region of the U.S. Today’s event is hosting five sessions:

• Moodle: Introduction & Highlights
• Faculty Perspectives on Using Moodle
• Student Response to Moodle
• From One CMS to Another in a Summer: Blackboard Basic to Moodle
• Customizing Moodle

The weather made me a bit late so the first session, Moodle Intro & Highlights was already underway by the time I got here. The speaker was Ellen Murphy, Director of Technology Integration for The Sage Colleges. She used her own Moodle site as part of the demo which in essence was a fly-by of the typical features of Moodle. Unfortunately her talk was interrupted by technical issues and as a result the flow of the discussion was not as smooth as I think she might have liked. She emphasized taking advantage of the Moodle.org site for development and support.

Sidebar: It was interesting to hear the 60 or participants echoing their frustrations with Blackboard. I ran into my CIO down here who was facilitating a NERCOMP Project Management seminar in the same building. Turns out he was using our local efforts to examine our LMS strategy as the basis for the projects that his seminar participants were focusing on. The reactions to Blackboard in his room were almost as polarized!

The second session, Faculty Perspectives on Using Moodle was for me an invaluable insight into what is important to faculty when it comes to the adoption of Moodle as the LMS platform in higher ed. Joanne CannonCarlson, Assistant Director of Educational Technology Services at Smith College was accompanied by three of her faculty members. From the English department, Jefferson Hunter. Representing the Languages, Judith Keyler-Mayer and from the Psychology department, Beth Powell.

• When working with faculty – do so one on one
• IT folks don’t always make the best teachers – different areas of understanding and expertise makes for translation errors! Workshops don’t always take into account the wide range of skills being brought to the table. Often workshops cater to an assumed skill level which may not reflect the actual skills of the attendees.
  
• The glossary feature, when moderated or edited by the professor, helped to correct errors in classroom notations and improve student learning and retention.
• As a professor, gave up nothing moving from Blackboard to Moodle, but gained a better user interface.
  

Session three, Student Response to Moodle, was a presentation by Paul Chapin, Academic Technology Specialist from Amherst College, on student usage of the former Blackboard solution and their perceptions of Moodle. The beginning of the presentation was an overview of current studies and surveys. He cited the following data sources (I’ve linked to the ones I could find):

• Humboldt State survey
• University of Otago, NZ studies
• Hong Kong Institute of Education
• Idaho State University Moodle Resources – (not cited but I found it while searching for other references)
  

The most used aspects of the LMS itemized below in order of highest to lowest usage (which I think he pulled from another recent study I will try to find and cite):

• Course content
• Announcements
• Discussions
• Grades
• E-mail
• Drop Box
• Group Functions

At Amherst, they tested Moodle with just a few pilot courses. No formal training in favor of just in time support. This went largely unused as their faculty weren’t interested in trying anything new. They also surveyed their students about their usage of Blackboard, their usage of Moodle and which they preferred (Moodle won by a large margin but few responses fell into the Highly Agree column. Students just wanted a decision to be made and did not want more than one environment to work in. They also mentioned that the value of either LMS was dependent solely upon the faculty member’s effective use of the technologies to further class objectives.



Session four, From One CMS to Another in a Summer: Blackboard Basic to Moodle was presented by Joanne CannonCarlson of Smith College. Their move to Moodle resulted from an inability to upgrade their system due to lack of financial support from their administration. College would pay for basic Bb license only, but faculty wanted the feature set in the Enterprise license. Deciding factor was the reality that there were now tools available that could do at least as much as their Bb product and in many areas could provide even more functionality at a potentially lower cost. The conversion process was not without pain – porting courses from Bb to Moodle involved a significant effort on the part of her staff of three student workers who did the work to port more than 200 courses over the summer. The worst part, Joanne noted, was the porting of quizzes as these all had to be manually recreated.

TCO focused on three areas: 1) Licensing fee (Bb Basic – $12k annually based on campus size and feature set), 2) Hardware and infrastructure requirements and 3) Support cost. Their experience was that supporting Moodle takes approximately 10% of her time compared to the 50% that Bb had required. Their first semester of use showed an increase in the total number of active courses taught, from 300 under Bb to 400 with Moodle. Moodle is also being used by departments and campus organizations for communication and management.

Most important lessons learned: only two faculty complaints about the new system and throughout summer they would port course and send out an invite to that faculty member which individualized the approach to retraining. The training focused just on those tools that they had already been using through Blackboard.

Smith factoid: 100 hours of training yielded 400+ courses in Moodle
this past fall. 2 complaints – 0.5% of total faculty population

Smith Documentation – some really high end items here, including Flash-based tutorials

Session five, Customizing Moodle, presented by Damon Blanchette of Smith College touched on hacking Moodle. Touted the resources already available through Moodle.org in the form of modules and plug-ins. He mentioned that Smith had incorporated Quickmail to facilitate communication. In my own state of New Hampshire, the Portfolio block is also a popular add-on. Gradebook+ from Humboldt State is another add-on they are using.

As Smith is a Banner school, they are looking to integrate their SIS with their LMS. This is something that bears watching for us as we are a Banner shop as well. Smith is using Moodle 1.7 which has a number of improvements, one of which is the institution of new roles in the environment which can specify with granularity what each role is capable of doing.

[tags] nercomp, moodle, lms, cms, course, management, system, learning [/tags]

Blogged with Flock

There are a number of online resources if you have the patience to search and sift through the flotsam and jetsam to find your answer. Of course, this approach assumes that you know your question. So I did a quick search for Moodle titles and came across two publications. One is a 2005 title published by O’Reilly and entitled “Using Moodle.” The other title is by a publisher I had never heard of, Packt Publishing. Written by William H. Rice, the book is entitled “Moodle – E-Learning Course Development.”

I asked for a complimentary copy to review and they were nice enough to accomodate me with the caveat that I write a review of the title. I’m in the process of tying the book to my faculty development and will publish the review here in about a week.

In the meantime, I’ll be attending the NERCOMP Moodle Interest Group this Friday at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. If you’re a reader and attending let me know and we’ll catch up F2F!

Turns out that a number of larger higher ed institutions in the United States are using or turning to Moodle as well. The list below is compiled from Moodle’s registered sites list. I was surprised to see so many University of California schools on the list considering their system-wide adoption of SAKAI. There was also a recent article on the Campus Technology website that mentioned UCLA was adopting Moodle as their campus LMS.

Here’s the list:

• Alaska Pacific University, AK – http://distance.alaskapacific.edu/
• Albertson College of Idaho, ID – http://moodle.albertson.edu/
• Alma College – http://courses.alma.edu/
• Anaheim University, CA – http://online.anaheim.edu/
• Antioch College, OH – http://gamma.antioch-college.edu/moodle/
• Athabaska University, CA – http://www.athabascau.ca/media/index.php?id=132
• Augustana College, IL – http://moodle.augustana.edu/
• Humboldt State University, CA – http://learn.humboldt.edu
• San Diego State University, CA – College of Education – http://coedata.sdsu.edu:16080/moodle/
• University of Florida – College of Education – http://online.coe.ufl.edu/
• Earlham College, IN – https://moodle.earlham.edu/
• Eastern Kentucky University, KY – http://www.modellabschool.com/online/
• Guilford College, NC – http://moodle.guilford.edu/
• Huntington University, IN – https://myclasses.huntington.edu/login/index.php
• Illinois College, IL – http://www.ic.edu/moodle/
• MIT, MA – Teacher Education Program – http://education.mit.edu/moodle/
• East Carolina University, NC – http://eagle.aos.ecu.edu/moodle/
• Kalamazoo College, MI – http://moodle.kzoo.edu/moodle/
• Colorado College, CO – https://prowl.coloradocollege.edu/
• Salem College, NC – http://moodle.salem.edu/college/
• SUNY, Oneonta, NY – https://aristotle.oneonta.edu/moodle/
• UCal Davis, CA – http://moodle.ucdavis.edu/
• UCal Irvine, CA – Distance Learning – http://learn.uci.edu/cms/
• UCal Santa Barbara, CA – http://www.moodle.cs.ucsb.edu/
• University of Hawaii, HI – Department of Educational Technology – http://etec.hawaii.edu/courses/
• University of Minnesota, MN – https://moodle.umn.edu/
• University of New Mexico, NM – College of Education – http://ssc-sf1.unm.edu/
• University of South Dakota, SD – Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN) – http://moodle.usd.edu/
• UCLA, CA – http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/
• University of Washington, Tacoma, WA – Pilot – http://moodle.tacoma.washington.edu/
• Bradley University, IL – Pilot – http://blackboard.bradley.edu/faculty/LMSreview.shtml

[tags]lms, cms, learning, course, management, system, moodle [/tags]

powered by performancing firefox

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

The Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba is hosting the Connectivism Online Conference. Thanks in large part to the efforts of George Siemens, this wholly online (oh and did I mention, FREE!) conference runs from 2-9 February 2007 and will feature the likes of Stephen Downes, Terry Anderson, Bill Kerr (link to presentation material) and Will Richardson as well as George Siemens himself.

This event will employ both Moodle and e-lluminate and will cover such areas as:

“…trends in K-12 sector, trends in higher education, research and net pedagogy, technological and societal trends, and connective knowledge and connectivism.”

I am looking forward to this event and hope that you will join me there!

Note: Bill Kerr’s link has been updated to reflect his new location and he kindly offered a link to his presentation material.

[tags]occ2007[/tags]

technorati tags:occ2007, connectivism, learning, online, conference

Blogged with Flock

I used the data from GA to create a visual representation of the hits to my blog:

(To view a larger version, click the image above)
It still amazes me that the world is so connected. Who would have imagined even just a few years ago that one person could connect, if only virtually, to an audience that hails from across the globe? So a shout out to those few folks whose locales I could assume: Dave Cormier and Stephen Downes, Jeff Utecht, Wes Fryer and Doug Belshaw. And a virtual hello to my visitors from Pakistan, Mauritius, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Republic of Korea, the Phillipines, Taiwan, Japan, South Africa, Dubai, Singapore, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Jordan and Israel. Prior to GA, my old blog stats even showed a hit from Iran!

To quote Disney, “It’s a small, small world.”

[tags][/tags]

powered by performancing firefox

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I’d like to take a post to congratulate my colleague and fellow re-visioning conspirator Casey Bisson on his Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. The focus of this award is his work on WPopac, a WordPress based OPAC, or online public access catalog. The best way to understand WPopac is to read the WPopac post.

Casey’s mantra is “findability” and he often quotes Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. His attention is directed towards more than simply making library catalogs publicly web accessible but making them more valuable by encouraging interactivity and user feedback. Although the term Web 2.0 has been hacked to death by those who love it and those who revile it, the bottom line still remains that web denizens are no longer content to be consumers when they can become contributors. WPopac looks to bridge the gap between patron and library and reinvigorate libraries in the process.

The details of his award can be found in the following press release.

Congratulations again Casey and Plymouth State University!

UPDATE:

More WPopac goodness:

From NHPR: Library Collections Could Soon Be On The Web

From the Shifted Librarian, Jenny Levine: Libary 2.0 in the Real World

From Information Wants to Be Free, Meredith Farkas: Casey Rocks…
[tags][/tags]

powered by performancing firefox

This first post will set the stage for this re-visioning.

At Plymouth State University, we use SCT’s Luminis product as our campus portal. We are very proud of our true single sign-on methodologies as pretty much everything a student needs is tied to their portal account: email, calendar, groups, news, their e-coursework (via WebCT), library resources, the Student Information System (SIS), even their 200+ MB of network storage is web accessible. It is one of the most robust environments I have used when it comes to student services.

Yet there exists a disconnect. The portal does not speak the language of our students. It is based on technologies at least 5 years old and is not as interactive or responsive as the web tools available today. In Web 2.0 terms, it is more like Web 1.5 – more pull than push, more consumptive than contributive. In short, it is perceived to be an administrative tool rather than a learning resource. A necessary evil for doing the business of higher education.

And then there is our Learning Management System – WebCT (now Blackboard). Everything about the LMS screams academic administration tool. It provides all the requisite tools: syllabus tool, communications tools, assessment tools and learning content tools. But even with Blackboard’s burgeoning attempts at learner-centricity in the journaling, web link and media library contributions, peer review and blog tools available in their latest Application Pack, it is still a tool for teaching rather than learning. If you’ll pardon the melodrama, it lacks soul.

In part 2, we’ll throw out our current set-up and start from scratch.

[tags][/tags]